The agents stood, began to file out.
Bob leaned close. “Sorry, I’m tired. Do you want me to can it with my doubts? I see it ain’t helping you much.”
“Nah, everybody knows you’re crazy. Plus, you’re the big hero. You get to do what you want. What you’re doing, questioning, prodding, bringing your unique skill set and IQ on to this stuff is very helpful, believe it or not. The kids on the team love you, so it keeps them working hard without complaining. It’s a win-win, but just don’t go mouthing off to any reporters.”
“I hate those bastards.”
“Get some sleep. You’re not Superman anymore.”
“Don’t tell no one, but I never was.”
TIMONIUM HOLIDAY INN
ROOM 233
JUST NORTH OF BALTIMORE
0430 HOURS
He slept the dark sleep of the dead, dreamless and heavy, gone far away from the world. Then a dream began to nudge him. It seemed that one of his hands was bound, he couldn’t move it, it stymied him and he twisted against it, beginning to come up through the various levels of consciousness and REM until he arrived hard at the insight that his hand was bound to the bed head-board and it then occurred to him that he was in fact awake and that he wasn’t alone.
“I’m in night vision,” a voice said softly. “I can see everything you do. Take the other hand out from under the covers and lay it out in front of you, wide open. Keep it there. Otherwise don’t move. I have a gun on you, but I don’t want to kill you. The bullet would probably bounce off, anyhow.”
Swagger knew the voice. It pulled him to full alertness.
“Cruz! How the hell did you—”
“I can get into and out of anyplace. I’m a Ninja assassin from the planet Pandora. I am the trees, the wind, the planet itself, white man. My face is blue.”
He laughed a bit, dryly, at his own twisted sense of humor.
“And I’ll ask the questions.”
“Man, you are crazy coming in here like this.”
“Just answer. What was with all those poor Filipinos who got wasted last night? Does that have a connect to this sordid little game?”
Bob said nothing.
“Come on, Gunny, I don’t have all night. Don’t make me use the blowtorch on you.”
“It was my fuck-up,” said Swagger, then explained briefly how it had happened.
“And the Bureau doesn’t see any tie-in?” Cruz asked.
“They’re not saying that. They’re saying no evidence.”
“They don’t want evidence. They don’t want to go into some cesspool of national security bullshit where a faction of CIA is trying to take out an American sniper team to save an Afghan scumbag from the headshot he so richly deserves, and the whole thing spins out of control in some kind of sick mission-creep phenomenon.”
“They say the guy is clean. They’ve gone over him a dozen times—”
“If he rises, they rise. That’s how it works. It’s politics and ambition, there, here, everywhere.”
“Cruz, maybe you’re overplaying it in your mind. The weight of combat operations, all them tours, the kills—”
“I saw a building in Qalat I’d just exited turned into a crater and thirty-one people thermobarically toasted. I saw Billy Skelton torn in two by some motherfucker on a Barrett .50. I saw Norm Chambers with a hole in him the size of a football.”
“You have too many people working against you.”
“As long as I’m on the loose, as long as you think I’m going to cash out the Beheader, you guys have to ask questions. The more questions you ask, the harder you look, the more likely it is to become unraveled. That’s my game. You want to stop me? Figure out what they’re pulling off with this guy Zarzi—”
“Everything you say sounds like you’re psycho about the Agency. You’re implying the Agency is after you. You should know, the Agency is cooperating with the Bureau. I’m working for an Agency officer I’ve known for years, and she’s smart, tough, fair, and decent. She wouldn’t be party to some scam that targeted our own people.”
He was totally aware that he had become Nick. Now he was the guy saying “no evidence” and “stuff like that doesn’t happen” and “it’s all subjective.” Yet the theater of the moment forced him into his supervisor’s shoes, because if he just dumbly agreed with Ray Cruz, where did that leave him? Not on this side of the law.
“Think about it,” Cruz responded. “At our level, we take out a double-0 license on a warlord. Off Two-Two goes. Halfway there we’re intercepted by contractors who classic-ambush our sorry asses. I discover they’ve been tracking me by satellite transmitter implanted in my SVD. I pull a switch on them and get away. I make it to Qalat, tell my people I’m setting up the shot as planned. I enter the building, then I depart the building, because I know somebody in the system is talking. And they knew which building. A fucking missile totals the building. Much more than a Hellfire.”
Now he became Susan, speaking for the Agency of mystery and endless games, with objectives so shrouded no man could view them. Again, a feeling of rootlessness hit him: if you could change perspectives so quickly, then who, really, were you?
“You don’t know it was a missile. Lots of things blow up in that part of the world. And if they wanted you to abort the mission, they could have simply ordered your battalion CO to issue the withdraw. The Agency has that kind of power. It’s a phone call, that’s all. You’re saying they hired contractors, ran an ambush in tribal territories, finally called in a missile shot, when they could have reached the same ending with a phone call. Sergeant, it doesn’t track.”
“Think harder, Swagger. That’s all I’ve been doing for six months. If they go through channels, through the leaky, penetrated, cheesy-security chain of command, then everybody in country knows the Agency’s got game with Zarzi, and pretty soon everybody everywhere knows. Maybe his own ex-friends behead him. Maybe the newspapers blow it all over the front page and his political future is shot. Langley couldn’t have that. To protect their boy, they had to double-tap Two-Two, and once it started, they couldn’t stop it. So whatever they’re doing, it involves Zarzi. Zarzi’s the key. That’s the end of the—”
He seemed to run out of gas. He, clearly, was exhausted as well.
Finally he said, “Either you stop him or I will.”
“Sergeant Cruz,” Swagger said, “I’ll make you a deal. You go underground. You don’t try no more attempts on Zarzi; I will see what I can see and learn what I can learn. I will get people to help and to talk. I’m their big hero now, I’ve got a tiny amount of juice. You check back with me, and I will have something for you. Just trust me a little. If I discover what you say is true, we will go in together, sniper all the way. Fair enough?”
Again he was aware, painfully, that the deal he offered Cruz he was basically offering himself as well. I will consider it. I will put it on the table and look into it, because in its way, it coincides with my own doubts as well.
The pause told him Cruz was listening.
“You have a few days,” said Cruz.
Bob felt a tug on his wrist and the flex-cuff was cut.
Then the sniper was gone.
ON THE ROAD
U.S. 215 EAST
1430 HOURS
THE NEXT DAY
Can we stop?” inquired Professor Khalid. “I have to go to the bathroom again.”
“Ach,” said Bilal, “you old men. You have to go to the bathroom all the time. We have a schedule.”
“But I can’t do what I must do pissed up. One does not martyr oneself with urine in the underpants.”
“Martyrdom is a week away,” said Bilal, “if this van doesn’t break down or I don’t go mad listening to you two argue all the time.”
“Do you not think,” said Dr. Faisal, “that the boys of Palestine feel a pee drop or two dampen their trousers before they detonate? Yet they detonate, nevertheless.”
“No,” said Professor Khalid. “They are too insane. They
feel nothing. Besides, their penises are probably engorged at the prospects of sexual activity in the next world, just seconds away. No pee could pass. Their dicks are hard, their pants are dry, and ka-boom, imagine the surprise when the next world turns out to be a blind walk through eternal blackness, if even that. No breasts, no cunts, no oral enticement of the members, nothing.”
“He cannot say that!” screamed Dr. Faisal. “Apostate! Infidel! He must be beheaded, as the text states clearly! He cannot say such things!”
“Dr. Faisal, if I behead him, then the whole point of the trip is destroyed. You will not have your martyrdom, you will not have your many women.”
“He does not believe in the women thing,” said Professor Khalid. “He cannot let himself state it as such, but in his mind, he does not believe in anything any more than I do. He clings to his faith as a prop to get him through this last ordeal.”
“Is that Disneyland?” said Dr. Faisal suddenly.
“No,” said Bilal, “that is not Disneyland.”
“I would like to see Disneyland,” said Dr. Faisal.
“That is Las Vegas,” said Professor Khalid. “You can be forgiven for mixing up the two. It’s all the same America. Pleasure domes, games, stupid distractions, and the pursuit of ecstasy. No rigor or discipline anywhere. Spiritual torpor. Meanwhile, in his faith, it’s all memorizing bad poetry written seventeen hundred years ago by a psychotic charismatic high on drugs. That is what he thinks is revealed truth.”
“Tell the apostate,” said Dr. Faisal, “that his musings are pornographic. He denies the true faith and his afterlife will be a forever of torment and pain in flames on a spit. He should check 72:23 for a sense of what lies ahead.”
“Who would prepare such a dry, tough dish?” asked Khalid.
BALTIMORE FBI HQ
WOODLAWN
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
1135 HOURS
THE NEXT MORNING
The press conference had not gone well. The pressies seemed enraged that the man the Administration was touting as the Answer to the decade-long war in Afghanistan had almost been shot to death on a Baltimore street. Who was at fault? When it turned out to be the infamous Nick Memphis, who at one controversial point in his career had seemed to utterly foul up the investigation of the death of Joan Flanders and three other martyred sixties peace demonstrators, their anger only grew. Not even Susan Okada, who represented the CIA in this issue and was, incidentally, quite beautiful, could mollify the snide hostility in the questions, even as she expressed thanks from the Agency for the superb job the Bureau had done in protecting the principal. Even the Secret Service rep’s insistence that it was one FBI agent who had foiled the hit did little to quell the emotion. “The system worked,” he maintained. Tough sell. And when the only real news that could be announced was the bland insistence that “we have some suspects and some leads, but this appears to be a very tricky, dedicated individual,” it only pissed them off further.
By contrast, the press conference that Ibrahim Zarzi held in Washington the same day was some kind of lovefest. Declared a hero by the Administration for his refusal to yield to a murder attempt against his personage, he was magnificent: generous, brave, noble, handsome, sexy, cosmopolitan. He specifically singled out the nameless agent who had foiled the attempt, wishing that this brave man would come to visit him in Kabul and see the hospitality of the Afghan people. He expressed his admiration for both the FBI and the CIA for their dedication to his safety. He said he feared nothing, as Allah had given him a destiny and he would fulfill it or die trying. What was death? When so many of the brave have died, what was death? Yes, he agreed that it was indeed ironic that once he had been called “the Beheader” and now his survival was the key point of statecraft of the United States. He promised more for our two great countries, a future of peace and prosperity and so forth. He really laid it on. They really ate it up.
“Not that it matters,” Nick told his inner circle a short while later, “but if we don’t get this guy, I am so gone it’ll make your noses bleed. I will be lucky to end up in Alaska investigating the Fairbanks garbage scandal. But enough about me.”
The overnight reports contained no breakthroughs. The only new piece of information was trashman Larry Powers’s description of the rifle he’d briefly seen in the cab of the truck, a very short bolt-action rifle with a thick barrel and a thick scope.
Bob was asked at the meeting for his opinion on the weapon.
“I’m betting it was a sort of Remington bolt-action rifle, short action, maybe in .308 or even .243 or .22-250. So I’d advise the people in South Carolina to try to find records for a transfer of that rifle in that caliber to Colonel Chambers’s shop. I’m guessing he did the work, or his smith. I’m also thinking a new barrel with an integral suppressor rather than the ‘can’ type that screws on, again for the shorter size. I see a gun that’s mostly suppressor and action, without a lot of barrel or stock. He carries it looped to his body at the shoulder, under a coat. He just reaches in, pivots it upward and it’s already set against his shoulder by the loop, goes to scope, maybe a red dot because, remember, he said it was ‘thick.’ Then he fires, slides it back under his coat, and wanders down the street. You’d never know he had it.”
“Is that legal?” asked someone, and there was laughter because some thought it was a joke, but Bob answered it anyway.
“You’d have to get ATF to clarify, but I’d say no on two counts. The suppressor is classed as a Title III item, like an automatic weapon, meaning it has to go through the legal hoops for private ownership. Did Chambers’s outfit have the legal classification to manufacture and sell such a thing? As for the rifle itself, if it’s less than eighteen inches in barrel length, it cannot have a shoulder stock.”
“Why don’t we turn the whole thing over to ATF,” somebody said, again to laughter that was simply to express the fact that the agents had very little to go on: their own law-enforcement-only distributed picture of the suspect, his habits, his background, and very little else. It looked as if the only chance for an arrest would come if he made another attempt.
“He won’t,” Bob told Nick a few minutes later in Nick’s temporary Baltimore office. Susan was there too, in the usual pantsuit, her hair unusually mussed, and of course the more it got mussed the more Swagger got mussed. She was long, tall, thin, mostly leg, with high cheekbones and some kind of mean intelligence behind her bright eyes that would always keep you from confusing her with your mama. Thirty-eight, going on twenty-five, face smooth, wise, serene, perfectly colored in nuances of lavender and off-pink, like some kind of ancient vase behind glass. She knocked him out every goddamned time.
“How do you know?” she said.
Maybe he said it because it was his job; maybe he said it just to see a flair of response in those dark eyes.
“Well,” Bob said, “because he told me so last night.”
FOUR SEASONS HOTEL
SUITE 500
M STREET NW
WASHINGTON, DC
1300 HOURS
I’d like to follow up, sir, on the irony theme if I may,” asked David Banjax of the New York Times, recently exiled from the Newark Bureau and on a very short leash back in the Washington office, trusted only for a one-on-one setup by State Department flacks. “Do you consider it ironic to visit this city, with its monuments, its marble vistas, its statuary, as the center of a state visit in light of the fact that at one time you were sworn to destroy it?”
“Oh, Mr. Banjax,” said Ibrahim Zarzi, a fraught look on his handsome face, his dark eyes pooling with melancholy regret, “I am afraid you have been misled by early press reports which ascribe to me activities in which never ever did I participate. One has enemies. Enemies fight with more than bombs, they fight with unpleasantly inaccurate information. This is exactly such a case.”
They were in a room on Zarzi’s floor in the Four Seasons immediately after the news conference and all around Banjax, watch faces undulated gently.
Square, round, black, gold, white, vivid, subtle, encrusted with jewels, screaming of Special Operations by dark of moon, or seductions in the dining room of the Ritz, it seemed like some kind of slow-motion museum on the theme of time passing. It was hypnotic. He thought of a common scene in a certain kind of movie that always seemed to take place in a field of reeds or wheat things (wheat fronds? wheat leaves? wheat staves? wheat puffs?) weaving rhythmically in the wind. Wasn’t it the one where the girl first gave her heart and her body to her lover? And wasn’t that sort of what was happening now, as it was his job to be seduced by the charisma of this man, whom the Times already supported editorially, and to give him his say about his colorful past? And on top of that, it was making him a little bit sick. In the pit of his stomach, he felt uncertainty.
“Well, sir,” said Banjax, “it is true you were once known as ‘the Beheader’ for the unfortunate death of Richard Millstein, which was videotaped and shown around the world.”
“I am so glad that at last I have a chance to address that tragedy. In fact, no, I was not to blame, nor in any way responsible for Mr. Millstein’s death. That I swear. That I attest, with one hand on the holy Koran. Sir, I am rewarded in my patience that I will make my virtue and my innocence clear once and for all in this matter, peace be upon you.”
He smiled, teeth glittering. He had changed for the interview and now wore gray flannels, Gucci loafers (no socks), a white shirt open to the midchest and displaying bronzed, toned muscularity and a frost of hair, some kind of massive black military watch on one wrist that set off the many gold rings his fingers sported. He was lean, muscular for his age, and bold with macho vitality. Polo later, perhaps? A brace of grouse? Perhaps a ride aboard Jumbo in the forests of the night after a tiger, burning bright, and if the Jeffrey .500 didn’t put the big cat down and he made it up the elephant’s back, then there was always the double-barreled howdah pistol to drive two .600 nitros into the animal’s open jaws and jackhammer him to earth.